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Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Barrier #2 Review (Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin)

It’s been a nine month wait since the first issue but Barrier #2 is finally out!

Liddy, the American cowgirl, and Oscar, a Honduran chap trying to get into America illegally, have been abducted by aliens on the Texas border. But why - and what are the aliens doing on Earth? I didn’t love this one as much as the first - it’s a lot slower moving. The issue has a bit of an overlong and dull beginning with peeps from NORAD saying acronyms to one another as they stare at the giant spaceship that’s on their radar. Also, besides Liddy and Oscar meeting on the ship, not a whole lot happens - this is very much a bridge issue that gets us ready for the meat of the story to follow.

If Brian K Vaughan’s script isn’t the most riveting, Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vincente’s visuals more than make up for it. The exterior shots of the spaceship as it travels through space were really trippy and colourful. The interiors too make the alien ship look like some awesome theme park!

Some of the alien designs though aren’t that original - Martin is basically using HG Wells’ aliens from War of the Worlds with their tentacles and tripods. The ones in the final pages though - wow! I wasn’t too sure what poor Oscar fell into in the ship either - alien eggs/plants or the horse eyeballs that were taken out of the horses in the first issue? - but the answers can wait for later in the series.

This is an untranslated bilingual comic so if you don’t know any Spanish like me you’re not gonna understand anything Oscar says but Martin draws the figures so well you can follow his scenes through his body language. There’s also some full-frontal nudity so this isn’t really a kid’s comic.

Barrier #2 is a decent continuation of this intriguing story with some stellar (pun intended) art - let’s hope we don’t have to wait another nine months for the next instalment!

You can read the comic for free or you can give the creators something for their efforts - name your price over at http://panelsyndicate.com/!